Social from the Start

The Ayatana Project is striving to improve the perception and presentation of information on the desktop. The fruits of the project can be seen in the way that social media and social networking are increasingly integrated into the core of the Ubuntu desktop.

From the beginning of the evolution of Linux on the desktop, one of
the many benefits of the open-source methodology is that we often can be
reactive to user needs much quicker than our proprietary counterparts. The
reason is simple and gets to the heart of open source itself; with more
people inspired, motivated and equipped to solve problems, problems are
solved more quickly, and everyone in the community benefits.

Just over a year ago in Spain at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, Mark
Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu Project, started coining the term
Social from the Start. His idea was also simple: to build social media
and social networking into the core of the Ubuntu desktop. As the leader
of the Ayatana Project (which has been driving desktop innovation in
Ubuntu), part of his vision is that access to social tools should be
simple, elegant and integrated. We have seen the true fruits of these
efforts shipped in the Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx release.

In this article, I peel back the covers and explore what Social from
the Start currently includes in the Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx desktop and
the opportunities we have open to us in the future.

The Messaging Menu

When the Ayatana Project first was announced, its focus clearly
was articulated as improving the perception and presentation of information
in the desktop, hence the name of the project—the Buddhist term for a
“sense base” or “sense sphere”. The first innovation along this mission
was the new notification bubbles that have shipped with Ubuntu for a few
releases now. The next major change was the messaging menu, as shown in
Figure 1.

Figure 1. The Messaging Menu's Notification Indicators

The messaging menu provides a single place in which new information
is made available to you. In a default Ubuntu installation, e-mail in
Evolution, chat messages in Empathy and tweets in Gwibber are all
made available in the messaging menu. In the past year, we also
have seen numerous other applications make use of the messaging, such as the
XChat-GNOME IRC client and Zimbra. The messaging menu neatly merges all
of these different information flows together into one common place on
your panel, only ever a click away.

By default, the messaging menu includes three primary types of content:

A key component at the core of the social-networking support in Ubuntu
is a simple little tool called Gwibber. Gwibber is a window in which
to view a world filled with different social-networking Web sites and
streams. Gwibber provides support for Facebook, Twitter, identi.ca,
Flickr, StatusNet, FriendFeed, Digg, Qaiku and more networks are added
with each release.

To use Gwibber, you first need to have an account on at least one
social-networking service it supports. As an example, I have
a Twitter feed at www.twitter.com/jonobacon, and I can use
Gwibber to send and receive content without ever having to use the
normal Twitter Web site. Gwibber's major benefit is that it brings
all of these different social-networking services together into one
window. Continuing my example, in addition to Twitter, I also have a
Facebook page (www.facebook.com/jonobacon) and an identi.ca account
(identi.ca/jonobacon). Ideally, not only do I want to read all of
these feeds in one place, but also when I post a message, I want it to
appear on all three at the same time. This is simple with Gwibber.

Let's first set up your accounts for the system. To do this, click your
user name in the desktop panel (in the top-right part of the screen), and
in the menu, select Broadcast Accounts.... The window shown in Figure
2 appears.

Figure 2. Setting up broadcasts accounts is simple in Gwibber.

Click the Add... button, select the type of account and then click
the Add button next to it. Finally, enter the login credentials for the
account, and click the Add button to complete. Repeat this process for
each of the different accounts you want Gwibber to talk to.

Now, let's see your accounts in action. Click the messaging menu (the
little envelope in the panel), and click Broadcast to load Gwibber. A
window that looks similar to Figure 3 appears.

Figure 3. Gwibber provides a stream of social-networking messages.

Gwibber is split into a series of panes called streams. The stream on the
far left is the Messages stream. It displays all the messages of the
people you follow across the accounts that you set up in Gwibber. It
merges all of these different messages into one place and organizes them
chronologically. You can see which network a message is from by looking
at the icon next to the name of the person in the message. Gwibber
repeatedly updates all the different streams to keep you up to date with
new content.

To the right of the Messages stream is the Replies stream. These are all
the messages directed at you (for example, in my Gwibber, all messages
with @jonobacon appear in this stream). Messages that come into this
stream not only appear in Gwibber but also a notification bubble appears
indicating a message has arrived that you may want to reply to.

To reply, hover your mouse over the message in Gwibber, and click the small
envelope. The recipient's user name now appears in the text entry at the
bottom of the window. Type your message, and Gwibber indicates
how many letters you have left within the 140-character limit. With the
character limit so precious, Gwibber also handily shortens
Web addresses you paste into it. When you are ready, press Enter or
click the Send button to send your message. Your message appears in
your Messages stream to show it was posted.

When sending a new message, under the message entry text box is an icon
next to Send with for each of the different accounts you configured
in Gwibber. Click these icons to select or deselect to which networks your
message will go. By default, your message will go to all networks.